Tea Cozies
by Ms Western Ink
Summary: She couldn't believe he was telling her a story... well, fine, she'd tell him one too. [AxM] SL November.


**Tea Cozies**

**SL November **

**1 of 1**

* * *

The room was quiet. He was always quiet, intimidating in his silence. She served him silently. He didn't acknowledge her presence beyond his customary greeting. He would simply wait and she would simply serve. It was the routine they followed.

Greeting, serving, silence, departure.

She found it dull.

She'd given up on the little jokes and the anecdotal stories from the Aoiya. Now she saved those for special occasions, times when she felt energetic. Today she was tired; she'd been up virtually the entire night going over the accounting book. Things were not looking well but neither were they on the brink of the poor house. It was, as she had so called it, a slump.

The others had been less than encouraged by her remarks and Okina had taken the books from her rechecking everything only to come up with the same result. She'd been offended at his thinking her numbers to be wrong.

"Are you unwell Misao?"

With him, in his virtual spell of silence, the last thing she'd expected to hear was his voice… speaking to her, no less. She looked up to see his eyes were steady trained upon her. He held his teacup in his hands, the glass small in his large palms. The gentle column of steam too far away to warm his face and she was reminded again of just how much of him there was, he was such a _big_ man.

Unlike Himura, who was rather small in comparison. She stifled her giggle.

"I'm fine, Aoshi-sama. I was up late working is all and Okon and Kuro have been arguing all morning. Then Shiro and Omasu decided to make their opinions known and I haven't had a quiet moment all day."

He accepted the explanation without clarification or further inquiry. He nodded his head once, closed his eyes, and brought his cup to his lips. The steam gently wafted over his face, warming him.

She sat forward and closed her eyes but there was no warm tea cup in her hands. She never drank tea with him. Sometimes she bought him little side-dishes though, a plate of sliced oranges, a tea cake, maybe a few candies, anything that was sitting about the kitchen that looked tasty. Sometimes he ate and sometimes he didn't.

She didn't really feel like thinking about it. She relaxed her shoulders and tried to meditate. She'd been giving it a lot of effort lately as her stress seemed to just build and build and build. Jiya was absolutely no help with his continuous lack of faith in her efforts. If anything, that only made things worse. She wasn't a little girl; she sighed softly and relaxed herself.

* * *

She was asleep.

Aoshi watched Misao as she stayed precariously balanced before him and yet remained sound asleep. It wasn't a behavior he hadn't seen before, but not typically caused by only one night of ill sleep. No, he came to the grim determination that Misao had been kept awake many nights over the last week and perhaps more.

Standing silently he padded toward her and sat down beside her. He didn't attempt to scoop her up and deposit her in his lap, instead, he let her head rest against his shoulder and there she relaxed on her own. He had never thought that Misao would remain small enough to sit so comfortably in his lap as she grew but then he'd always tried very hard to avoid thinking too much about her.

Now she was a young woman, no longer a child and while he _knew_ it was so, he didn't quite _understand_ how he felt about that. He had never been, or tried, to be an overly emotional man and he had never dabbled in love and proper relationships. He knew the physical things, those he had learned ages ago but the finer things, the courting and wooing and the intricacies of female emotions; those remained much of a mystery to him. He wondered if any man knew the female mind and then doubted it.

Beside him, Misao shifted and sat straight and the movement seemed unintentional as it woke her. He could tell by the way she tensed.

"Aoshi-sama… oh! Did I fall asleep? I'm-"

He saw fit to cut her off. "Lay down, Misao."

"WHAT?"

Again, calmly, he instructed her. "Lay down."

"Right here? On the floor?" She sounded scandalized as if he had told her he wanted to do something private to her. Or, perverted as the case may be.

He nodded simply. "Yes, there. You aren't sleeping, here, today, you can rest."

"I don't think it's proper to sleep in the Temple," she started.

"Lay down," he ordered sternly.

She did as he bid and lay down on her side.

"There was a girl once who spent her day bringing joy to others…" he began and Misao was floored.

Was he telling her a story?

Like, a bed time story?

She held her tongue and listened.

"…when she retired to her room in the evening she told herself she was happy because she had made other people so. But what she truly was was sad. The longer it continued, the worse it became. She had no one to listen to her troubles, to comfort her, to bring her joy as she did for so many others and she became distraught. In her weakness, she fell ill and those to whom she'd brought joy came to visit her."

Misao frowned but kept her eyes closed.

"In her sick bed, the girl had fallen asleep and knew nothing of her visitors or their gifts for her and there she died."

"I knew she was going to die," Misao murmured. "You never did tell stories with happy endings, Aoshi-sama, not even when I was little. You were always talking about what other people did wrong and what life lessons there were in the story. The boy who didn't think before he acted and got his fingers cut off, the girl who wandered away from her family and drowned because she didn't tell anyone where she was going, the lady who tried to defend her home by herself when she was alone and ended up stabbing herself, the man who found himself tied up and in trouble because he couldn't' stop talking all the time… " she turned her head and looked back at him with a smile. "I remember."

"Life lessons are not usually pretty," he noted soberly.

She rolled her eyes at him. "You could've told me pretty stories! Like the one about the fox who is rescued by a traveler from a terrible trap, and the magical fox becomes a woman and marries the traveler and lives happily ever after… Or about a man who went fishing and caught a magic fish and had three wishes given to him. Or about another man who went looking for a lost fish hook in the water and found a kingdom beneath the sea and then he married the King's daughter, but when she was pregnant and it came time to have their baby she tossed him out … but he peeked and saw his princess was actually an alligator!" She beamed a smile at him. "See! Good stories!"

He didn't smile or give any indication of amusement but the little lines around his eyes were no longer tilted downward. She smiled wider. Telling when he was amused was so hard…

"Let me tell you a story with a life lesson, Aoshi-sama… Once there was a girl who fell in love with a man she'd known her whole life. But that man was dangerous and mysterious and her family didn't really approve. They told her to move on with her life and to meet other people but she refused. One day, that man left her, but she refused to be put off so she followed after.

"Along the way she met a strange man and brought that strange man home with her. But when she got home, she found the man she loved was there, but he'd turned into a monster… and the family said she had to give up and that he was dangerous and an enemy but the stranger … he promised to bring that person back home to her, so she refused to give up hope because you're not supposed to abandon people you love. So she waited.

"The stranger delivered for her and brought the man she loved home. He wasn't the same as when he first left and he wasn't the monster who had appeared before her during her search, he was a totally new man, so again, she waited."

When she didn't continue, he looked up. "And?"

Her eyes widened. "Really? You can't tell? The girl is obviously reckless, she's going to get herself caught in a mess, tied up with rope, and tossed into the ocean where she'll drown and the whole city will mourn her because she was irreplaceable! I'm a much better storyteller, Aoshi-sama."

She stood up, dusted off her hands and paused.

"Are you done with the tea?"

"You didn't get very much sleep."

She lowered her head. "It's okay. Actually, Okon bought this special tea for me earlier today, so I'm going to try that tonight. It's herbal, I think it smells like flowers, she told me to shut up and drink it."

"Why can't you sleep?"

"I just worry too much and worry over nothing no less. I know it'll work out okay." She scooped up the tea tray and walked to the door but his voice stopped her from stepping out.

"Misao." She turned back. "Is the girl, the one waiting, is she waiting for nothing?"

"I don't know, Aoshi-sama, do you think she's waiting for nothing?"

He turned his head away from her. "No, but she needs to be more mindful of her mouth to keep from getting tossed into the ocean."

She laughed and stepped out.

He spent the rest of the day thinking of her laughter and how beautiful a sound it was.

* * *

AN: I agonized over this during November and I sit down tonight and it writes itself. Perfect, this is exactly what I wanted and that rarely happens. 


End file.
